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EGTN Hawai’i Trip – Day 1

Hello again everyone, this time from the beautiful island of Maui! It hasn’t been too long since we’ve had one of these little posts as Max and I were home for a week before hitting the road again. Basically enough time to throw everything in the wash, repack the necessary cords then jump back on the road. Main goal for this trip will be the installation of two new observatories to the EGTN! It is the first time we have embarked on a trip that has two complete new installs! First one is here on Maui. While we already have an observatory on the North side, we have now traversed through the saddle of the island and are sitting on the South side. Here is a picture of the new guy:

We arrived on Maui late last night in order to be here for the internet install this morning. As we are fairly remote, cable/dsl/etc is not available on site. I know everyone is too familiar with the waiting game for utility installs, but everything today went fairly smoothly with our technician’s arrival. After arriving and scoping out the area we agreed on the location of the install and we all jumped in to work. While the technicians work is obvious, Max and I took advantage of this time to set up the computers for the new shed as well as plan out the telescope layout.

All was going well with the installation, until the technician walked over scratching his head saying he couldn’t lock on to the signal. I asked what the issue was and he pointed over to a tree. So after bouncing a couple ideas around, the best idea in my mind was to jump in the tree and start cutting branches. As the tree is already dying, it was a matter of giving it a “haircut” to account for our hardware. Only minor caveat, we didn’t have a saw. I can now check trimming a tree with a pocket knife off my list…

Here is the tree post grooming session as well as the amount that was taken off the sides. You can’t tell too much in the first picture, but the lower right part of the tree was taken out. We’ll get a chainsaw out here later this week to properly finish the job.

With the tree cut, the internet still wasn’t working so the technician went on to other hardware possibilities until finally going with a more nuclear option of replacing the modem. Thankfully it was the modem and we were able to get all computers up and online following the modem swap.

So now with the computers setup, installed, and online, we are ready to start dropping telescopes in tomorrow! I’ll leave you with a quick picture I took around sunset tonight. Talk tomorrow!